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According to Texas rules, all candidates for the twirling line must be at least sophomores and able to play a musical instrument well enough to make the school band. At Huntsville that in itself is serious business, because it means dealing with Richard Wuensche, 36, the intense, bespectacled perfectionist who directs the band. Wuensche (rhymes with clinchy) is known as The Chief, and the 175 members of the Huntsville marching band are Wuensche's Wonders. For eight years they have won the Division One rating for high school bands in Class AAA (schools with 625 to 1,300 students).
Wuensche's world is prey to minicrises. A pants zipper rips on a band uniform. A flute player is absent. A clarinet complains that the baritone sax is spitting on her. But the real plagues of Wuensche's existence are the twirlers' parents. Among his duties is the awesome responsibility of choosing the Huntsville line. Parents of unsuccessful candidates have accused him of favoritism and threatened to have him fired. Things got so bad that Wuensche no longer allows parents to attend the twirling line tryouts, which are now held behind locked doors in the gym. "They all think their kids are the best," says Wuensche. "They've spent a lot of money on them, and they don't want to waste it."
Indeed, by the time a girl is good enough to strut her stuff for five minutes at the line tryouts, her parents have quite a bit invested. Private twirling lessons can run as high as $25 an hour. A week at one of the dozen or more twirling camps that blossom in the heat of Texas summer is about $90. Stretchy costumes cost as much as $60. The batons themselves, chrome-plated steel from 16 in. to 30 in. long, are about $12.50. Twirler parents spend about $600 a year, and some begin pushing their daughters into contests before they are old enough to go to school.
"Our Susan got her first baton when she was four," says Billie Clendennen, a Huntsville mother whose 14-year-old will try out for the line this spring. But Joyce Moore, 36, whose daughter Sonia, 14, won Little Miss Houston Baton when she was five, now regrets encouraging her daughter so early. "That way they grow up too quick," she says. "Sonia never liked dolls. Kids her age bore her, and she don't like boys her own age."
Most members of the Huntsville line have taken dance lessons for years. During the summer, twirlers practice four hours a day, often sacrificing personal plans so the line can work together. As a group they attend a twirling camp for a week to perfect their struts and tosses. Following Labor Day they work on their half-time programs after school for two hours each day. "Sometimes my boyfriend wants to go for a Coke and he can't understand that I just have to go twirl," Robin Coburn moans.